How was Buridan’s thought shaped by its institutional setting and by pedagogical practice in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris? This essay argues that local circumstances are crucial not only for interpreting Buridan’s arguments, but also for understanding his larger contribution to the history of philosophy. Thus, we find that even working within the constraints of the arts curriculum, Buridan was always able to segue from established modes of instruction and prescribed topics to discuss philosophical problems of interest to him; in this he was no different from other arts masters of the period, and indeed, from university lecturers even today. But he also used his independence to embody, in ways he himself may not have fully understood, a new way of being a philosopher. Whereas a century earlier, Thomas Aquinas saw himself as a theologian and regarded philosophy as an activity proper to pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, Buridan sought to define what he was doing in contradistinction to theology, and on grounds we would now recognize as secular.